Creating new face emoji

October 29, 2021 2:55 pm by Neil Cohn

It’s been awhile since I’ve done a blog post, but here’s some fun news… I helped create several of the new emoji that have recently been added to phones, and it seems people got excited about it! 

I was contacted several years ago by Jennifer Daniel at Google, who works on their emoji and is the Unicode Subcommittee Chair for emoji. Together we proposed several new face emoji, many of which have now been approved to be added to the emoji vocabulary set. Ours include the breath face 😮‍💨,  the melting face (also designed by Erik Carter), holding back tears, and dotted line emoji. Our approved emoji seem to have gotten some people excited, because the melting face emoji was then written up by the New York Times, which prompted Stephen Colbert to have a section about it in his opening monologue:

Then, people over here in the Netherlands found out about it, and my contributions to the emoji werewritten up in the Brabant Dagblad newspaper, and the story then (very surprisingly!) appeared on the front page of most of the newspapers in the country. The newspaper article was also accompanied by a video interview on the AD news website. 

This led to a flurry of additional interviews with media around the Netherlands. I was on a segment of Omroep Brabant (4 minutes in), and this nice segment on the Khalid and Sophie show on the channel NPO1:

 

 Plus, I was interviewed in a story on whether we have “enough” emoji for RTL news, which also had a video segment on EditieNL (I’ll post if it becomes available).
It’s been a wild and fun few weeks of emoji media, and I hope people get as much use of the emoji as we hope. The experience is perhaps summed up by one of them nicely: 😮‍💨

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